Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself, (I am large—I contain multitudes.).36
Now that you know how your jealous mind operates with emotions that overtake you, and how you cope by interrogating, seeking reassurance, and looking for clues, we are ready to explore some new—more powerful and helpful—ways to live. You will learn how to: step back and observe jealousy without getting hijacked; recognize the difference between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; and talk back to the negative, overwhelming thoughts that seem so true in the moment. We can make room for jealousy without feeling crowded out by it. It helps to accept that all of us are flawed and imperfect, and that we all have difficulties. With this acceptance, we can live in the real world.
In Jealousy Mode, our thoughts and feelings get stormy. It’s like we are caught in a tornado, being tossed around in winds of fear, anger, confusion, and sadness. Thoughts jump at us and take us over. We feel we have no self-control, no ability to get out of the storm. The blaring thoughts and terrifying emotions suck us in, and we often feel there is no chance for escape. Karen said, “I feel like I am possessed by some force beyond my control. When he tells me that he was at a party and ran into his ex-girlfriend, I feel overwhelmed with every horrible emotion that I could ever imagine. I want to scream. What the hell is wrong with me?”
We seem to think our lives should be free of jealousy, anger, anxiety, sadness, and resentments—we should be happy all the time. But life is filled with frustrations and disappointments that can be rough to ride at times. Life is not always going to be the way we want it to be. Sometimes we want emotional perfectionism—to be content, at peace, happy, and secure—but life doesn’t work that way for us.34 And it doesn’t work that way for anyone. When a painful feeling comes along, we get wrapped up in it—as if it’s the only feeling we will ever have. Our emotional perfectionism tells us that things shouldn’t be this way.
Because we are hijacked, we think we must get rid of these feelings, banish these thoughts, and clear our minds and hearts. We want peace, clarity, and certainty. Without this tranquility—which seems perpetually beyond our reach—we feel we are lost. But as we struggle more to get rid of these internal experiences, we feel even more helpless and confused. We don’t know where to turn. The storm keeps churning inside our heads and our jealous hearts.
Alone and embarrassed, you ask, “How can I stop feeling this way?” You think there is no way to live with these thoughts and feelings. You may even think that in order to stop the storm you need to end the relationship. But you love this person and don’t want to lose him or her. After all, isn’t keeping your partner what the jealousy has been about from the beginning?
In this chapter, we explore how you can live with thoughts and feelings—even ones that you don’t like—without getting hijacked. It’s like learning to tolerate the crazy uncle who shows up for a holiday dinner. You stand back, observe, but don’t engage. By noticing, observing, and accepting, you can live with the background noise in your head without jeopardizing the relationship that you value.35
Don’t assume the jealousy needs to disappear. Allow it to be there, without taking over. Allow it to be what the two of you can accept—for the moment. Allow it to nag you, annoy you, or scare you—without it taking over everything. Think of the jealousy as alarms sounding, many of them false alarms. For now, you will recognize that jealousy is here, the alarm is going off, and you and your partner will accept it.
You have heard the sounds before: jealousy is an echo from the street, it is a blaring horn in traffic, it is a shout from an alley. It might pass by. It might wake you up. Allow it to happen without getting hijacked by it. When you hear the siren on a fire engine go by, you don’t need to chase it.
Imagine your relationship as large enough and rich enough that it can handle and accept the background sounds of a jealous voice. Once you can both accept that it is here, that it sounds off alarms, then together you may be able to take steps toward working with it. It’s something for the two of you to learn to live with.
“But,” you say, “how can I tolerate these angry and anxious feelings about someone I love? I can’t stand having all these feelings. Shouldn’t I feel one way?” In the poem “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman describes how he loves the old and the young, the beautiful and the ugly, the rich and the poor. He embraces all of life, all of humanity.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself, (I am large—I contain multitudes.).36
Think of your jealousy as containing multitudes, with a full range of feelings in your relationship. It contains love and hate, peace and conflict, fear and serenity. It is all there, all part of the full experience. We only contradict ourselves when we think we should feel one way. Your jealousy is one of the many experiences, ways of feeling, and ways of relating that will be part of this large, complete, human bond.
If you are the object of a partner’s jealousy, you are probably demanding—or hoping—that the jealousy goes away and disappears. You want things to be just right with your partner, with peace and happiness. You want it calm and easy.
In 1967, Thomas Harris published the bestselling book, I’m OK—You’re OK. I guess that he was an optimist. After all, do we really believe that we are all okay? Do we really believe that we don’t annoy each other, disappoint each other, and judge ourselves and the people around us? I don’t find the book’s sentiment to be realistic.
I have a different idea about relationships. See whether it fits your experience: I’m not okay, you’re not okay—but that’s okay. Because aren’t we all a little bit irrational, a little crazy, a little unfair? If you are okay with that, then you can live in this world of imperfect people and fallen angels, and trod through the ups and downs of life. We often wish that we lived in Utopia, a place of perfect harmony. But keep in mind that the word “utopia” was drawn from the Greek word for “no place.” You can’t get there from here, because it doesn’t exist. Here are some ways to view this world, the one we live in, that can help your relationship.
Think of it this way. Your partner, who is feeling overwhelmed with jealousy, feels all alone, frightened, helpless, confused. Imagine that he or she is in a dark cave. There are different passageways in this cave. You are there together and you have a small, dim candle. You are trying to find a way out—together. You are both afraid and feeling lost as you hold the candle. You fear the candle will go out and you will be completely in the dark. But you learn that, if the two of you hold the candle together and breathe compassion into the flame, there is more light. It may be that you don’t know which passageway leads to the way out. But you do know that you can walk together.
Just as we need to make room for jealousy in our intimate relationships, we also need to make room for it in our work, family, and friendship relationships. Painful and difficult feelings can arise in any relationship that matters. With your colleagues, you may have an idealized view of how things should be done. Let’s say it’s that everyone should be fair, all the time. That view would be wonderful if we lived in that kind of world. But we don’t. So recognizing that someone else might get more attention than us is a reality we need to be prepared to encounter. We can’t continue to say, “I can’t believe that happened!” when it seems to be happening everywhere else. Just because things aren’t fair does not mean that you can’t win the game. We must learn how to live effectively in a world where unfairness is all around us. Successful people know how to get along with unfairness. They don’t take it personally and they strategize for success.
Making room for jealousy means we recognize that our relationships are complex, so we need to accept a wide range of emotions—not exclusively positive and pleasant ones. We can still love a partner or friend and still have angry, jealous, resentful, and even vengeful feelings toward him or her. That doesn’t mean we act on all those feelings, but it does mean that people can frustrate us, disappoint us, annoy us, and let us down.
Our unrealistic desire to have only pure and wonderful feelings toward people in our lives is something I call “pure mind.”37 It’s a kind of emotional perfectionism to say, “I should only have positive feelings toward them and they should only have positive feelings toward me.” Unfortunately, that’s not the real world. The real world is filled with disappointments—along with joy, meaning, and love. But no one is that good. We all are prone to let each other down at some time. The question is: Can we pick ourselves up and repair the damage? Can we survive the empathic failures in which we fail to connect, support, and care in the way the other person expects us to? Living life without disappointment is not a possibility. We all fail at some point, myself included.
What do you do when you are disappointed or disillusioned? Some of us become pessimistic, some build walls around themselves, some attack the world in protest, and some gain realistic and more complex views of life and relationships. I choose the latter.
I have learned that trying to be a saint will have one result: living in hell on earth. Because the truth is that we are all fallen angels. Keep reminding yourself, no one is that good. No one is free of jealousy, resentment, envy, boredom, anger, or disappointment. Everyone has a dark side, along with a brighter side—despite our wish that brightness encompass the complete reality. Relationships are not simply about feeling good all the time. Relationships can be difficult, almost impossible at times. It’s not always an easy thing to love someone or to be loved. It’s not easy having friends, siblings, and colleagues. We can be difficult with each other.
Relationships are about the capacity to feel everything—and to still go on. In place of emotional perfectionism, I would suggest emotional complexity and emotional richness.
A thought or feeling can become even more powerful when we struggle to eliminate it. We want to shout at ourselves to “Stop thinking the way I’m thinking!” or to scold ourselves for the feelings we have: “You’re doing it again, loser, you’re feeling jealous.” But the more we struggle, the stronger thoughts and feelings become. It’s like one of those 1950s atomic-bomb monsters that gets stronger the more we shoot at it with our weapons. It gets larger and takes on the energy of our firepower. When we’re busy trying to shoot thoughts and feelings down, the struggle feeds their power. So what can we do when we feel this way?
One approach that is helpful is called “mindfulness,” which is simply paying attention to the present moment, without judgment and without trying to control things.38 Mindfulness allows us to stay here, in this moment, without jumping ahead to the future and without jumping back into the past. It allows us to let go of what we struggle with—thoughts about the past and thoughts about the future—to simply observe the present moment. When we are jealous, we pay too much attention to our thoughts, reliving a past moment and anticipating a future that may never happen. Mindfulness allows us to find a safe space in the present moment where we let go. We can let go by first paying attention to our breath. Let’s try it right now.
For a moment, notice your breath. Notice where it is in its cycle. Is it coming in, going out? Just keep your attention on your breath. Don’t try to control it, don’t judge it—just notice it. Observe your breath in the present moment, notice how it changes, how it flows, how your breath goes in and out. Notice that your mind may drift to other thoughts or sounds, and then gently bring yourself back to your breath. Notice where your breath is in its cycle, notice how it goes in and out.
What if we could do this with our thoughts and feelings? Imagine having the thought, “My partner might be flirting with someone.” Imagine that thought is the breath that comes in and out. Imagine watching that thought, as if it is a string of words drifting across the sky. Imagine that you watch that thought slowly moving in a gentle breeze. Imagine that it is moving along with the wind. Stand where you are, and see the thought. Do nothing else, just observe it. It is here and you are watching it. Nothing is happening, the thought is drifting across the sky, you are watching it, standing in the present moment, observing, letting the thought come and go as it drifts along. Notice that you are still here, in the present moment. You are observing your jealous thought and choosing to do nothing but watch it. Another way to imagine this is to see your thought on a movie screen. You are sitting in your chair, comfortable, watching it play out. It is just a movie—one scene and it will pass. You are here, but the thought is over there.
You are not the thought and the thought is not you. You can allow the jealous thought to be on its own. It can drift along, it can call out, but you are safely in your seat. You watch thoughts and feelings going back and forth, noticing how they may pass by. They are on the move. If you don’t grab onto the thought, it will drift away. Away from you.
It may also drift back. Watch it, let it come and go. Like your breath, like the waves on the shore, gently coming and going. You are here. You are watching. You are making room. You are letting things be.
In this exercise, you simply sit and observe your breath—without judging how you are doing, without trying to control what you are doing. You simply observe and let your breath come and go. The purpose is to practice observing the present moment and letting it go with six simple instructions.
Mindfulness of the Breath Exercise:
You may find that your jealous mind hijacks you and that you get carried away when these thoughts and feelings pop up. With some mindfulness practice, you can imagine that these jealous thoughts and feelings are simply outside sounds. You can observe them and then bring your attention back to your breath or to the present moment. You can observe the jealous thoughts, and then let them go for the moment.
You may have been struggling with jealousy for some time—perhaps in other relationships, often secretly as you keep these thoughts and feelings to yourself. You may feel confused or ashamed, thinking there is something terribly wrong with you. Your jealousy may spring on you at any moment—when your partner is away, you two are socializing with other people, you are alone and think about his or her former lover. It seems that it can come at any time.
It is hard for you. Your jealousy is not something that you wished for, it is not something that you planned. At times, you think that no one really knows how hard it is for you, and you can’t confide in the one person you are closest to—your partner—the object of your jealousy. Because whenever you tell them about your feelings, it seems to backfire. You partner may say:
And this only makes you feel worse. So I am going to suggest a different way to look at your jealousy—I am going to suggest that you have a right to all of your feelings. We don’t tell someone with a headache to “Just get over it.” We don’t tell someone with indigestion, “There’s no reason to feel this way.” These are your feelings. Your anxiety, your sadness, your anger, your jealousy. These are yours for the moment.
For now, stand back and respect the feelings for what they are: a part of your experience at the present moment. A difficult part—but this is your experience. Allow yourself the right to have your feelings.
Now, this doesn’t mean that your thoughts about what is going on are based on facts. They may be, or they may not be. But facts are different from feelings. I can feel sad because I believe I will be alone forever, but the sadness is true for me simply because I am having that feeling. But I might be wrong about the future—about being alone forever. We won’t know until we find out what the facts are. But our feelings are indisputable. And sometimes they are difficult in the moment we feel them, so we need to validate our feelings. Validation is acknowledging the truth. And the truth is that you are having jealous feelings, they are your feelings, and they are painful.
You can validate your jealousy by saying to yourself:
Validating Yourself Exercise:
We often think that jealousy is only a sign of a problem. But you wouldn’t feel jealous if the relationship meant nothing. So I also recognize that jealousy may come from positive values and the commitment that you have to someone. Jealousy is your recognition that someone is important to you, that commitment, honesty, depth, and love mean so much to you. Ask yourself whether your jealousy is the painful sign of love and commitment. Respect yourself for having values of love, intimacy, romance, and loyalty. After all, your jealousy shows how connected you are. And it reflects your fear of losing that connection. Let’s look at my conversation with a client who was struggling with jealousy.
Bob: Sometimes jealousy is related to the positive values that we have, like the value of monogamy, commitment, honesty, closeness. Are these values that you have?
Bob: So, one way of looking at your jealousy is that things matter to you. You are not a superficial person when it comes to a relationship. You take things seriously.
Carol: Of course I do.
Bob: What if your partner said to you, “You know, I think everyone should be free to do what they want to do, so if you want to go out with other people—and have sex with them—that would be okay with me.” If your partner said that, what would you think?
Carol: I would think that he wants to screw around with other people. I wouldn’t trust him.
Bob: In a sense, you would want your partner to be capable of jealousy, because it would be a sign of commitment and a sign that you matter to him.
Carol: Yes, if he wasn’t jealous, I would think he couldn’t be trusted. I would also think that I didn’t really matter to him.
Bob: Perhaps jealousy, just like any emotion, has a positive side and a negative side. I think it’s important to recognize that jealousy not only makes sense, but may be a capacity of commitment and trust.
Carol: That makes me feel a lot better about who I am.
The first step in validating your jealousy is to recognize that these are your painful and difficult feelings. The next step is to see your worries, anger, and anxiety as coming from the fact that someone matters to you. You are jealous because someone you value, a relationship you value, may be threatened. It’s essential to affirm the importance of love and commitment, the values of intimacy and honesty, the desires for depth and meaning. Yes, those are important. But, at times tragically, the anger and anxiety of jealousy are the result. You feel things because things matter to you.
So you are locked in what seems like a dilemma—loving someone, but fearing them too. How difficult this must be. Validate the difficulty, the dilemma, and the conflict within you. Make room for what is inside you. You are filled with multitudes.
Another way to validate your jealousy is to recognize how universal an emotion it is. As discussed in chapter 1, we can find jealousy throughout the world, in different cultures, in different historical periods. We find jealousy in children, even infants. In animals, even insects. So understanding the universal nature of your feelings may help you feel less alone, less uniquely upset. When we recognize that our feelings and needs may be universal, we can accept them. We can allow them to be for the moment.
Consider the way you are seeing things. If you believe that your partner might betray you, we can understand how jealous feelings would arise from that belief. We can see that a lot of people might feel jealous if they believed that their partners might betray them. If you think, at times, that you would have a hard time living your life, or that you would feel humiliated, if your partner betrayed you—then we can understand how strong your emotions might be. Whether you find out that your perceptions are right, wrong, or in a shade of gray, these are your perceptions at the present moment and they may overwhelm you with painful feelings. Validating your feelings means also recognizing that your thoughts and perceptions may be linked to those feelings.
If you have a history of betrayal—if past lovers have cheated on you or if your current partner has been unfaithful—it’s understandable that you would feel jealous. This would make you prone to having these feelings, and to seeing a possibility of betrayal in your current experience. If one or both of your parents was unfaithful, or left, or wasn’t there, we can also understand that you might feel anxious. Because this would set the groundwork for difficulties with trust, and make you more sensitive. So, yes, understand that what you are experiencing right now may include past experiences as part of it.
And we should validate that it may be possible that your partner is not completely trustworthy. Maybe there is something to your suspicion, maybe your partner is not completely transparent, maybe he or she is not as reliable as you would prefer. Maybe you are right, at times, that there is something going on. So you may be responding to suspicions that could be shown valid. But even so, even if your thoughts and feelings make sense, even if there might be something going on, there is still a lot that we can do to help you cope.
It’s important to validate the feelings you are having, to respect your own feelings. Own them as yours, recognize that sometimes feelings are painful, it feels painful to love someone, we get hurt, and people let us down. Sometimes our fears come true. Yes, recognize that, validate it, and understand how it feels and why it hurts. And know that, even when we accept and validate what we feel, it is also possible to cope better.
Validating feelings doesn’t mean getting hijacked by them. You can acknowledge your anxiety and anger in the present moment, you can point to your jealousy and say, “I can see that I am feeling that way again,” but you stand back, stand apart, and take a moment to reflect. As you step away from the feelings for a moment, ask the following questions.
When we step back like this, we can see biases, thoughts, actions, and responses with more clarity. While validating the pain, we can also examine the thoughts that contribute to the pain, how we may act on our jealousy, and how we respond to our emotions—while still acknowledging them as painful. Having those feelings is hard enough, at times, but interrogating, scolding, punishing, threatening, following, ruminating, and worrying only add to our pain. Thoughts and feelings don’t have to dictate what we do or what we say. We can find other ways of coping, better ways. We are not slaves to our minds. We decide. We step back, think, and consider the options.
See whether there is a different way of coping with the way you feel. For example, you might learn that—while the way you feel at present might seem overwhelming, everlasting, and out of control—your current emotions are temporary, not necessarily destructive, and they don’t need to control you. Think about what can put things in perspective to help you stand back, accept, observe, solve problems, build a bigger life, engage meaningfully, improve communication with your partner, and learn that this life you are living is not dependent on any one person—except yourself.
No one knows how hard jealousy is for you like you do. No matter how understanding, how empathetic, or how caring your friends or partner might be, no one is going through the experience right now like you are going through it. Your jealousy comes from a fear of being betrayed or abandoned by someone you love. It may be the most difficult set of emotions that you have ever had. There are times when you might be angry at yourself for having these feelings, times when you feel embarrassed that you are feeling the way you feel, and times when you fear that your world is collapsing in front of you.
This is a time to stand back from the present experience of overwhelming feelings and to think about yourself as someone you care about, someone you respect, someone you love. We can call this compassion, because you want an end to your suffering and pain, you want to direct caring and accepting love toward yourself. You want to embrace yourself—along with your jealous heart—by imagining wrapping your arms around yourself, holding yourself, and assuring yourself that you will always try to be on your side. This is how you can care and soothe the broken heart within.39
You are always with you. You can always love you. You need the love, so why not give it to yourself? Why not always be on your side?
You can imagine the most compassionate, warm, loving person from your childhood or among your friends saying to you, “I love you, I care about you, I accept you.” Imagine this person wrapping his or her arms around you, holding you gently in a soft and loving embrace, being completely here with you at this moment.
Imagine that you are loved—by you. And imagine that you are always with yourself, always there to hold yourself in your heart. When you fear the loss of love, remind yourself that you are always here to love you. Then you can feel peace for the moment, as a serenity that blankets you, a calm that envelops you. Even in a storm, it can be calm in this loving embrace.
Now that you have taken a step back, to observe, listen, and allow jealousy to be there, you can start to examine your thoughts.